Midnight Light, by LeBlanc and Carr

You may be forgiven if you have never heard of the duo LeBlanc & Carr. I certainly had not until recently, and the circumstances that brought them to my attention were unusual. First, while listening to the Carpenters on Spotify, the algorithm eventually served up a song by LeBlanc & Carr titled Falling. It was an immediately appealing soft-rock ballad, but I was puzzled that I had never encountered the group before. My curiosity deepened when I later watched a video counting down the Top 100 songs of 1978 on the Billboard Hot 100 and saw the same song appear on the year-end chart. With a remarkable 28-week chart run, “Falling” was clearly a genuine hit at the time—and yet today it is almost entirely forgotten. That discovery made me curious enough to explore the duo’s only album, Midnight Light, to see whether this long-buried record deserved rediscovery.

“Something About You” begins the album, and it has a driving and upbeat music with some lyrics about love and devotion that sounds almost Eagles-like. Somehow this lovely little song has less than 20,000 streams on Spotify. “Falling” is the next song, a gorgeous soft rock classic that hit #13 on the Hot 100 (#2 on the AC chart), and features some sincere singing about falling in love set to some beautiful instrumentals including a guitar and a talkbox with some pleasant effects, likely the only song anyone has heard of from this group. “How Does It Feel (To Be In Love)” is back to a midtempo grove with some lovely close harmonies and jazzy instrumentation. Despite a sound that would have fit well with the Atlanta Rhythm Section or other soft rock groups of the time, this song has less than 20,000 streams on Spotify. The title track, with just under 70,000 streams, is the clear third-most popular song on this album on Spotify, and is a rather gentle and sincere number about a woman burned by a love for an absent man turning on a midnight light to demonstrate her openness to a love with the narrator that will comfort her through loneliness. “Stronger Love,” with a bit more than 900,000 streams on Spotify, is the clear second-most popular song of the group, which is a midtempo love song that has a pleasant disco sound and certainly could have (and should have) been a successful single in 1978. “Johnny Too Bad,” at just more than 10,000 streams, is the third-least popular song from this album, and features a lovely instrumental behind lyrics of a man whose trust in his gun is going to fail him that aren’t that far off from “Ride Like The Wind,” which came out a bit more than a year later. “Desperado,” a competent and even lovely piano-ballad cover of the Eagles classic with a gorgeous guitar solo, follows, and further demonstrates the influence of the Eagles on this duo. “Coming And Going” speeds things up a bit with some melodic mid-tempo instrumentation with tasty guitars and a driving rhythm section as the narrator expresses frustration with a partner who keeps coming and going rather than staying with him. Despite being a solid and enjoyable track that has hints of the Allman Brothers in it, it has around 8,000 streams on Spotify. Unbelievable. “I Need To Know” slows it down for another beautiful song about love and devotion with gorgeous, sincere singing as well as touching instrumentals. This song has just over 20,000 streams. The album closes with “I Believe That We,” an upbeat and optimistic love song with lovely close harmonies and references to a hardscrabble Alabama youth seeking to match with a wealthy but lonely girl that is strikingly relatable that somehow has about 8,000 streams. And with that the album closes at just over 36 minutes and ten tracks.

I’m left at somewhat of a loss to discuss how it is that an album that managed to have one hit managed to be so completely forgotten and not have a devoted group of fans willing to defend and even talk about it. This is by no means a daring and experimental album, but it is an album that has a top 20 hit, an excellent cover of a 70’s classic from the Eagles, immaculate production, consistently excellent musicianship, sincere and touching singing, competent lyrics that mostly revolve around the joys and frustrations of love but that show considerable stylistic depth and occasional genuine creativity (“Midnight Light,” “Johnny Too Bad,” and “I Believe That We” in particular). This album was made by a duo of talented artists who became more successful as songwriters than they were as artists on their own right, which is certainly lamentable, but this album is a proof-of-concept of grasping the essential elements of 70’s soft rock. Nearly every song here fits perfectly with different strands of soft rock as it was made at the time and would be made into the 80’s, demonstrating that even if few people have bothered to listen to it that they understood the music that they were about and had worthwhile music and sincere singing and mostly original songs to add to the genre of soft rock as a whole. This is an album that seems criminally unjustly obscure. Leblanc and Carr deserve to be remembered and appreciated for this album and it should have been successful enough to warrant another one. As it, this is well worth a listen if you have a taste for obscure but professional soft rock. Albums like Midnight Light remind us that cultural history is not only shaped by masterpieces and disasters but also by competent, sincere work that quietly slips through the cracks. Streaming services preserve these records, but preservation is not the same thing as remembrance—and LeBlanc & Carr deserve more remembrance than they have received.